


Ideation

by starkraving



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Fantasizing, Fjord doesn't know his own feelings, Gen, Light Angst, M/M, One-Sided Attraction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 13:17:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20082847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkraving/pseuds/starkraving
Summary: Fjord admires Caduceus, you know, in a totally normal and not at all weird way. Beauregard notices.





	Ideation

So there’s a bit of protectiveness that naturally generates among their group when Caduceus joins up.

Not a surprise. There’s a few reasonable reasons for it.

A: because Caddy has (if possible) less practical experience than Jester (a literal shut in). B: He’s a cleric and you guard your clerics because they’re the vicious beating heart of a combat unit’s anatomy. C: Molly is fucking dead.

It goes without saying because saying it would be awful, but Caduceus is very literally filling a void left by a violent death in the party and there’s no getting around the associations that come with that. The times that Fjord has accidentally called Caduceus ‘Molly’ out loud: 1 time. The times he’s started to call Caduceus ‘Molly’ and stopped himself: a fucking lot. Honestly, just, an embarrassing amount of times and Fjord would rather not too closely examine why it’s taking him so long to get it right.

“Fjord.”

“Hmm?”

It’s the middle of the night (or whatever passes for night in a city that sees no sunrise) and the interior of their Xhorhasian home is gently lit by the fire-fly glow of magical string lights and the flicker of interior lanterns. Fjord’s been sitting in the main common area, contemplating the falchion blade where he’s laid it on the table so he can stare at its golden gleam in detail and ponder the pieces of the Summer Dance rapier subsumed by the living sword. An echo of Mollymauk’s weapon still in the blade.

Beauregard climbs over the back of a chair and takes a crouched position next to him with her knees drawn up like a monk-ish gargoyle. She glances furtively across the room, then takes an overly casual posture with one elbow on the table to appear casual, but just ends up looking odd half scrunched in her seat but leaning her weight wrongly. She commits tp it though, eyeing him.

“What’s up?”

“Why… why’re you sittin’ like that?”

“I – what?” Beau self-consciously sits up, adjusts her hair, and pats her ribs down for some reason. “I don’t know what –” She shakes it off, annoyed, and yanks the chair around so she can sit backwards straddling it and facing him. “Fuck it. You’re staring at Caduceus. What’s up?”

Fjord blinks. “I wasn’t starin’ at Caduceus.”

“Are you wondering if his face is, like, velvety?” Beau lowers her voice in a conspiratorial way. “Because I’ve totally wondered that. Answer: Yes. Totally. He’s, like, slightly fuzzy all over. I dunno. I think it’s a firbolg thing.”

“What? _No_.”

He has, in fact, wondered precisely that.

“Well, okay, then that means you’re just staring at him. Unless you were zoning out and he was just, like, there. I’ve done that. Been there.” She nods. “Had to run from the city guard. It happens.”

“Beau, not to be rude or nothin’, but I wasn’t staring at Deuces. I was just thinkin’.”

Caduceus is on the other side of the room sitting with Jester who’s showing him something in one of her sketchbooks. The long blue length of her tail lashes around, flipping back and forth while she gestures grandly at what might just be a collection of smutty looking scribbles from one of Caleb’s smutty history novels or whatever. Cad looks politely baffled.

“I dunno, thought you might be…” Beau pauses as thought to reassess her commentary. “Look, a lot of other shit has gone down recently, but back in the City of Beasts, Cad went down. Like, for real. If jester hadn’t had that diamond…”

Fjord feels a slow tension crawl through him from his belly outward, recalling. “Yeah, that certainly did happen. Uh-huh.”

“Caduceus almost dies a lot and it kinda bugs me since, like, we kinda asked him out there with us after Molly died. Does that bother you? Cuz it kinda bothers—”

“Yeah, it fuckin’ bothers me.”

Beau looks at him. Dammit, that maybe came out a bit quick. Fjord by the nature of his innate half-orcish complexion cannot actually blush, but he feels his face get hot all at once and clears his throat while Beau’s eyes narrow. For all that she’s bad at talking to people, she’s pretty decent at reading them from time to time, not that he’s 100% certain himself what she might perceive.

“You worried about losing him?” Fjord rejoins.

“I was standing _right there_ when Molly died.”

There’s a moment of silence. Beau is staring at the table now, but isn’t seeing it. It’s the first time in – what? – how many months since Mollymauk took his last breath that she’s actually said anything beyond the most basic and brutal facts about it. She drums her fingers on the table after a second of quiet and goes on.

“Yeah, I just don’t want to do that again, you know?”

“Hey, I’m not gonna let anything happen to Caduceus.” A pause. He clears his throat. “Uh, none of us are gonna let anything happen. I think he’s got some big stuff he’s supposed to do, you know?”

Beau nods. “He doesn’t freak you out anymore, Fjord?”

“Freak me out? He never freaked me out.”

“Coulda fooled me the way you kept grimacing every time he, you know, is Caduceus and does something eerie as hell and a little morbid. Because, like, he does that. A lot.”

“Well, sure, at first. But I guess I’m used to it now.”

“Yeah.”

“And it’s kinda nice having someone in the group who seems to have confidence in where he’s going and what he’s doing.”

“Right? He’s so, like, sure.”

“I don’t know if sure is the right word,” Fjord says, shaking his head. “He definitely doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. And the stuff we do scares the hell outta him sometimes. But he just… I dunno. He fuckin’ _abides_. Bad shit happens and he just… has something else to lean on and he doesn’t know if that something is gonna let him die or keep him alive, but he’d be… fine with it. Does that make sense?”

Beau blinks. “That sounds like a thought that didn’t happen over the course of a short conversation there, Fjord.”

Shit. Fjord feels heat spread through his face but shrugs to hide it.

“He just ain’t scared of the same shit I am, I guess.”

Beau tilts her head. “What’re _you_ scared of?”

Shiiiiiit. Why the hell did he say that?

“Nothing specific. Just saying. Different views on the world and all.”

Beau squints at Fjord. Fjord maintains his casual demeanor with the professional control of a man for whom deception has come as second nature for about half a year now in the company of friends. He puts a real effort into appearing casual, lest Beauregard somehow glean from the angle of his eyebrows the constant underlying current of gut-clenching _fear_ that’s begun to grip him every night.

The nightmares coming faster now and more confusing – the oceans, darkness, Avantika’s laugh interrupted by the crack of her neck breaking, and the sensation that someone touched him while he was asleep. He wakes up certain there’s a rope around his neck or a hand over his mouth, fingers on his tongue, a fist around his throat and bone-crushing sinew wrapped around his wrists, his knees, his chest and dragging him down, down, down fathoms deep until the crush of darkness is so deep he just –

“So Caduceus is hot, right?” says Beau.

Fjord sputters. “_What_?”

“I’m kidding! Yeesh! Calm down, team leader, or you got that whole ‘doth protest to much’ thing going on.” Beau gets up, grabbing a sitting pitcher of water from the table. “Just saying, you’re staring.”

“I am not staring.”

“Whatever, man. If you want a sweet pink undercut, I’ll bet he’d tell you how to get one.”

“That aint remotely it.”

“I know,” says Beau, looking at him.

She waits.

Fjord isn’t sure why, in that moment, with her staring at him, the random impulse to just _tell her_ comes to him. He almost opens his mouth and forgets Vandren, almost swallows that voice like a pill he’s held under his tongue all this time. But the moment passes even as the pale blue curiosity of Beauregard’s stare holds steady and in the wake of that feeling of almost release, he feels tired.

Fjord sighs. “The truth?”

“Or whatever you feel like telling me. No pressure. You just… seem to be thinking is all.”

“I was thinking that his goddess, Melora, seems pretty cool.”

Beau blinks, visibly surprised.

“Oh, yeah, I guess so.” She grins. “Any goddess that says ‘get high and pray to me’ is pretty cool.”

Fjord glances at Caduceus who’s sitting cross-legged on the floor with their other cleric.

Jester appears to be showing him lewd diagrams, which he’s regarding with the same academic mien that one might regard anatomical drawings of flora. Fjord can’t begin to understand the compound flush of fondness and jealousy that takes hold of him looking at Caduceus; the fact that the closest thing he’s felt to that was when he first met Avantika – this confusion of response.

He realizes now that his impulse toward Avantika was certainly desperate self-defense and attraction, sure, but having more time to study a similar feeling now, Fjord thinks he got it wrong. He didn’t want to _possess_ the person he was looking at or be possessed by them. Looking back now, he wanted to just _be_ her.

He wanted to inhabit the body of someone who knew what the fuck they were after so badly it felt like arousal. So he doesn’t know what to do with the fact that, lately, when he looks at Caduceus he feels the same unformed impulse to occupy the same damn space as him.

The waking fantasy where he crosses the room, ignores the disinterested academic look Caduceus levels at anything suggestive, and finds out exactly what it would feel like – sliding your fingers into unkempt mane of pink, gripping hold, and pressing your mouth against his. Tasting his tongue, feeling that strange and intimate vibration in his throat when he tries to talk through a kiss so you can just swallow that sound.

Fjord doesn’t know what to do with the notion that doing so would tantamount to worship – or blasphemy – but he knows that the impulse is taking root inside him. Sure as a notion to touch something he shouldn’t just to _know_ the feeling of it. He doesn’t know what to do with this raw, ugly ideation.

So Fjord just grins back at Beau.

“I mean, I sure wouldn’t mind that,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> Fjord has it BAD for Caduceus but in the weirdest possible way. I'm into it. Comments are greatly appreciated. Someone please come out here and talk to me about this incredibly weird dynamic.


End file.
